Graying Trieste Sets Stage For Europe

July 31, 2000|By Tom Hundley, Tribune Foreign Correspondent.

A recent survey by Censis, a large Italian polling organization, concluded that 75 percent of the population equated immigrants with crime, even though crime statistics show that the immigrant community population is significantly less inclined toward criminal activity than the native population.

Anti-immigrant feelings run strongest in northern Italy even though the industrial north has benefited substantially from low-cost immigrant labor, and northern businesses have been pushing Rome to increase Italy's rather stingy quota on legal immigrants, currently at 63,000 a year.

In the immediate postwar period, the northeast region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which includes Trieste, was one of the most depressed in Italy. Today it is booming, thanks mainly to thousands of small, family-run industries.

About 15 percent of the workers in Friuli-Venezia Giulia are immigrants, many of them illegal.

Trieste relies heavily on workers who cross the border from Slovenia and Croatia. Locals call them pendolari because they go back and forth every day.

Officially, there are about 200 Slovenian citizens with legal jobs in the Trieste area; an additional 500 to 1,000 are employed on temporary contracts, usually in the construction and shipbuilding industry.

In reality, a small army of 5,000 to 15,000 workers crosses the border from Slovenia each day, according to Trieste University's Chies. Mostly they are women who clean houses or take care of elderly people. The pendolari cross the border in buses or car pools. A longstanding agreement between Italy and the former Yugoslavia allows residents of the border areas to transit without visas or even passports.

"They say they are going shopping or that they are visiting relatives. We can't stop them," shrugged Antonino Abate, chief of the border police for the Trieste region.

In the postwar era, the economic revival of northern Italy was fueled by migration from the country's historically impoverished south. Although unemployment in some parts of the south is more than 20 percent--double the national rate--southern Italians no longer seem interested in moving north.

This month, for example, an elder-care cooperative in northern Italy reported that it sent out 30,000 letters offering jobs as nurses in assisted-living centers across the north. More than 10,000 such jobs are vacant. The letters were aimed at qualified candidates whose names appear on unemployment rolls in southern Italy.

The jobs pay $900-a-month after taxes--the standard industrial wage in Italy. Only 53 replies were received in response to the mailing.

Just across the border in Slovenia--and further east--where wages are less than half what they are in Italy, there are plenty of potential takers. And because Slovenian workers return to their "homeland" each evening, and because their employers can skip the taxes and social welfare benefits that must be paid for legal workers, it seems these are "immigrants" Italians can live with. The city's population includes more pensioners than workers. As such, it is a demographic time bomb.